I have a purpose-built office at home. We bought the neighbouring apartment and I cancelled the lease on my former office. So in the morning, after my 60cm morning commute, I sit down to work, and then…
Ten minutes pass, or twenty, I start to focus. One child interrupts. I help with whatever. I try again, half an hour passes. Another interruption — a child perhaps, or my wife wants to discuss food for next week or wonders whether it's time for an espresso, or the DHL chap who knows very well that I'm there and can pass parcels to the neighbours. Hi Arnt
he says, I have a parcel for a <name>, can you…?
Later the neighbour will ring the doorbell too, but that's usually after the end of my working day. Usually.
After the third interruption it's really difficult to gain focus at all. The corona virus has turned my lovely office into almost a regular one.
Art was not the purpose of this blog, but I posted a photo of a bridge and liked the result. Whenever I posted something after that, I'd see some art when I proofread what I had just posted. Until the flooded bridge was no longer on the front page and I discovered that I missed it.
So I'm going to post some pure art every year, enough that there usually is something on the front page of the blog, because art is good for the mind. Perhaps that's also why I have a painting, a reproduction, and an abstract photo in my office too, […More…]
There's a lot of hair on fire this week...
This blog, like my other websites, does not process your personal data (arguably my personal data constitute an exception). There are no cookies, no comment forms, no login, no third-party plugins or buttons or scripts, nothing, and that's the way I want it. There is a server log file with IP addresses, which I can't remember ever using and have no plans to use, either alone, by combining them with any other personal data, or by giving them to any third party. I don't actually know for how long those IP addresses are kept. Not at the time of writing and certainly not at the time of reading.
Have a nice day. Don't panic.
I work at home, and I'm a bit frustrated with that this summer. I'm too remote, and we're not good enough at bridging that gap (half the fault is mine, to be honest). But my ex-colleague Bjørn Borud's latest blog posting makes me feel good again.
My office is suboptimal. I started with a dedicated room and have done as much with that room as I knew how to, and that's a great deal more than most companies are willing to do with their offices. Perhaps an unoptimised home office is no better than the regular kind, perhaps the main difference is that I have optimised my little realm for writing code while Bjørn's office is optimised for easy reorgs and long lines of sight. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I am not reduced to hunting for hotel lobbies where I can work semi-productively.
Said a great politician I don't quite admire: The actual policies are less important than the skill with which they are carried out.
There is something to that.
I have found fifty-three dollars on my desk. I remember why they're there: 15-20 years ago, someone whose name I have forgotten gave me a dollar to help pay for a haircut and three others then chipped in. Their four dollars
have littered my various offices since.
One of the three must've had too much to drink, because now that I look closely, I observe that one bill bears a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant and the number 50. Good. $49 is an appropriate fine for a joke as poor as that one. Justice has been served.
I'm back from having my hair cut. I'm not sure yet whether it was the right thing to do. Time will tell.
48cm and 33g in the Great Cut and another bit while adjusting afterwards.
As chance would have it, my favourite magazine Petits Propos Culinaires published an article on French hospital food in the same week that I went to hospital in Germany. The author was thrilled to receive an emissary from the chef who asked what she liked and what not, and told her that dinner would be soup followed by an omelette, salad and afterwards an apple doughnut.
In the event, the omelette had the consistency of a hard-boiled egg and was wrapped in cling film, etc.
Now I'm in a German hospital, and guess what, food is ordered using ugly machine-readable forms. There are three options for main dish each day, with two options for salad on the side. Today's salads are beef salad
and salad with beef
. I cannot investigate the difference (I am not not permitted to eat salad), but perhaps that's a feature.
Instead of beefy salads, they serve me pork, potatoes and a sauce apparently made from carrots, flour and monosodium glutamate. The pork yesterday had been butchered twice, that today had also been shredded to hide the evidence.
Fine French menu here, ugly German menu there, the food is the same. I take this to mean that large organisations will grow to act like each other where it matters. Only appearance will differ.
This is my answer to so how should the office be, then?
and so how does your office look?
, both of which are are entirely reasonable things to say to me, particularly this month. If you haven't talked to me about work environments and productivity, this post may be one to skip. […More…]
I ditched the old laptop bag and got a new one. Much better. The new one is roomier on the inside than outside — and just as dangerous to aircraft security. Things end up in it that I don't know about. During my first two trips with the new bag, I have already brought several dangerous materials undetected through security checkpoints: dangerous liquids (an orange, a large bottle of hair conditioner), a sharp knife and of course something explosive.
Nokia's rampage makes me want to post the picture below.
It's from a very rainy Friday in September 2000. I had a meeting around noon that day. Directly afterwards, I went for a weekend in the mountains with two friends, and I felt just like that.
About an hour after the picture was taken, over dinner, I explained my mood. Unless things change, I expect I'll leave in a few months
. My forecast was good, I gave notice four months later, ten minutes after another depressing meeting.
I am reminded of the Inmos Transputer.
That, as my older readers may still vaguely remember, was a freak processor in the eighties. It was designed for parallelism: Its fundamental design was for a computer with many transputers, not one with a single humongous blob. Each CPU was small, simple (the wikipedia page includes the complete instruction set) and linked to four other CPUs using bidirectional message-passing connections, and the design allowed vast CPU meshes with message routing and forwarding.
The thing that reminds me of the transputer is the way those links worked. When a Transputer received a message that had to be forwarded, it would prioritise communication over its own computation.
I am reminded of this because my mail is down. A great big failure happened during Christmas vacation. Then a routing mishap left me unable to take part in a video conference this morning. I am forced to prioritise my own programming over message passing, and it feels so good. Yesterday was great.
Tomorrow I shall apologise to borud about my unresponsiveness. But today, I plan to wallow in solitary hacking.
Actually I'll wait a few hours with publishing this. There's a chance someone might see it.
The Amazon Prime game is an odd kind of game: The players are Amazon and myself, but the winner is usually either DHL or UPS.
The rules are as follows: […More…]
Leaving the offices of customer.com today, I pressed the button half a dozen times. (For some reason, customer.com's planners thought it best to litter the offices with giant TVs, most turned on, all muted. There's a corporate espresso bar with seventeen corporate television sets. Really makes one wonder.) Walking to the hotel, I pressed the button a few more times.
Just as I was entering, I saw one last TV, reached for my tv-b-gone and... nothing. An employee had turned the TV off as part of closing for the day.
I'm not sure how I feel. Puzzled to have seen someone turn a television set off. Happy to have seen it happen. And somehow cheated.
Update: What a pity the TV-b-gone is too slow for drive-by actionism.
Tidying my office, chapter 17, in which beloved hardware is less beloved than a usable shelf.
I'm throwing away the keyboard Cherry made for me sometime around the middle nineties.
It has an AT keyboard plug, so I haven't been able to use it in a while, and it's worn out […More…]
One of my not very frequently used possessions is a large laptop bag. Big enough for two laptops and some random other items, or for one laptop, a change of clothes, random chargers and whatnot, and a book. […More…]
Now that we have two children, the daily routine has grown even worse. So we've adopted cross-paradigm best practice to manage and control complex projects, on-budget and on-time, improving parent/child satisfaction matrices.
We've adopted scrum. […More…]
A public service announcement: Upon learning that Dave Cridland describes identi.ca as a snark broadcast facility
and claims to use it that way, too, I have decided that when I cannot repress my snarkiness, letting it out at identi.ca/arnt is acceptable.
Maybe even good. rant.g/rant has helped me regain calmness more than once.
Stronger: I have two desks, and both are now reasonably tidy.
I've had a tidy desk before, such as when I moved to a new office in 1998, but this time no force majeure is involved. I tidied my desks, and kept at it until I was done. Three days.
I congratulate myself. My mother would, too, if I were to tell her.
Once upon a time, Norwegian residents could apply for a personal .priv.no domain by sending email to the hostmaster. I did so.
Times have changed, registrars and proper procedures now complexicate such things. Still, those who have .priv.no domains can keep them, […More…]
The icon was drawn by Brodd Nesset, based on exactly two sentences about what I wanted. 
I like it very much; it represents exactly what I want it to represent, and in a manner which represents me. Very grateful.
That's good, because posting this on my birthday would be a little boorish.
Every programmer has bad days. Days on which no code wants to be written, days spent tinkering with the CSS of a blog noone reads, or posting something to said blog.
Every programmer can do that. It takes a very special kind to ☑ finish a long posting on a subject which interests noone ☑ post it to a blog which noone can read, due to the sad state of IPv6 ☑ tinker with the CSS of that blog ☑ — using CSS3 text-justify, which no browsers support ☑ and finally to reconfigure the blog to withstand heavy load, as if IPv6 deployment were to happen before 2011. All on one day.
Canter & Siegel posted a few thousand spams (the famous green card spams), probably helped by someone with imagination and technical skill. Long and tiresome threads discussing the legality, morality and all other aspects of this resulted. Canter & Siegel then tried again on a different subject, this time without able help.
On the same evening, my friend Chris Owen posted a 300-line diatribe, rebutting something or other point by point. I clicked. I just couldn't bear to read it, and decided: It's time to stop discussing this and do something. […More…]
Postings to this blog represent the opinion of Arnt Gulbrandsen, arnt@gulbrandsen.priv.no, Schweppermannstraße 8, 81671 München, Germany. If something sounds more like fact than opinion, then it represents my understanding at the time of writing, no more.
Links to other sites worked as intended at the time of writing, but of course I cannot vouch for their accuracy or veracity at the time of reading.
There is no comment form here, because a) I wouldn't get any, so why bother, and b) German law effectively requires moderation, and that's a chore I hate more than most.
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